


Chasing Shadows

by RubyCaspar



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst, First Meetings, Fluff, Fluffy Angst, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-20
Updated: 2014-11-20
Packaged: 2018-02-26 10:33:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2648828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RubyCaspar/pseuds/RubyCaspar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no denying that there's an untold history between Nico di Angelo and Will Solace - these missing moments chronicle their journey to that hillside in Blood of Olympus, starting with their first meeting on 21st December, 2007.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chasing Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> As much as I love Rick Riordan's world, I've never been inspired to write fic for it until I read the end of Blood of Olympus. Something about Nico and Will has grabbed me and I absolutely had to write something - especially as their whole relationship screams BACKSTORY to me. So, here's my attempt at filling in the blanks - I'm sure (I hope!) it will be only one of many!

Camp Half-Blood in the winter was _weird_.

 

Will had actually been quite looking forward to getting back to camp early. Yes, it was depressing that he’d only lasted four months back home with his Mom before he’d been forced to flee back to the camp, but there was no denying that the summer - his first summer at the camp - had been the best few months of his life. So, silver linings and all that, he was trying to focus less on whether he’d ever be able to live out in the real world again, and more on the fun he’d have being back at camp six months earlier than expected.

 

But yeah, it was just really weird.

 

He’d reported to Chiron in the Big House when he arrived (the centaur had seemed pretty pre-occupied and sent him on his way pretty quickly) and then made his way through the snow (snow!) to Apollo Cabin. He could see some guys from the Ares cabin doing drills in the arena, Beckendorf was at the forge by the armoury, there was a light on in the Aphrodite cabin... but apart from that the only other sign of life he could spot was a kid he didn’t recognise, sitting by himself in the dining pavilion. He was young, probably a bit younger than Will, and looked kind of mediterranean. He was only wearing a light jacket over his jeans and t-shirt, but looked perfectly comfortable sitting at the Hermes table playing solitaire or something with a deck of cards.

 

Will, who was bundled up in a parka, gloves and two scarves, shuddered and kept walking.

 

He’d only gone about three more steps when the Stoll brothers seemed to appear out of nowhere, either side of him.  

 

“What are you doing here Solace?”

 

“Stupid question - he obviously missed me too much!”

 

Will grinned. Like most of the camp, he liked the Stoll brothers, and _unlike_ most of the campers he didn’t have to watch his wallet around them. He, Connor and Travis had come to an arrangement over the summer - they’d promised to leave his stuff alone and warn him if they had anything planned he should probably avoid, and he’d promised not to rat them out when they came to him to heal the many burns, scratches and minor wounds they managed to accumulate between them.

 

“I had to come back,” Will said. “There was a-”

 

“Doesn’t matter - dude, you missed it!”

 

“Missed what?”

 

“Last week! Thalia, Percy and Annabeth went to help Grover bring two new kids back to camp, and they turned up the next morning in Apollo’s chariot with not only the kids but all of Artemis’ hunters as well!”

 

“It landed in the lake, man. In the _lake_. They had to bring a heavy rainfall in because half of it went up in steam.”

 

“You can still see the melted canoes - look!”

 

“Anyway then we found out that Artemis has gone missing, right, so the lead hunter Zoe Something has gone on a quest to find her, and Thalia and Grover went too -”

 

“-not before they completely humiliated us in capture the flag though - Chiron said it was like the fiftieth time in a row-”

 

“- Percy went too, but not officially - he wasn’t picked for the quest at first but he followed them on Blackjack and Mr D let it slide -”

 

“-yeah but he hasn’t gone to get Artemis he’s gone looking for Annabeth-”

 

“-oh, yeah, Annabeth got captured when they went to bring the kids in-”

 

“-and one of the kids joined up with Artemis and became a hunter and she’s gone on the quest too-”

 

“-and then -”

 

“Woah woah woah STOP,” Will exclaimed, holding up his hands and staring at the Stolls. His brain was racing to piece together what they’d just told him, but it was pretty hard to get past the first thing they’d said.

 

“...Apollo was here?”

 

“Yeah - only for like a minute though,” Connor said. “He just dropped off the hunters and Grover and Percy and Thalia and Nico.”

 

“Who’s Nico?”

 

Connor and Travis both pointed at the dining pavilion, at the boy Will had noticed before. He was still playing cards.

 

“Nico,” Connor repeated. “He’s one of the kids Percy and Thalia went to get.”

 

“He’s in with us at the moment - undetermined,” added Travis.

 

Will got them to explain everything they’d just thrown at him before heading over to the Apollo Cabin, lost in his thoughts. Apollo had been there - there, in the camp… and he hadn’t been there to see. Will didn’t care about missing seeing the chariot turn from a minibus into a sports car, or seeing the half-melted canoes bobbing around on the water - his _dad_ had been there, and he’d missed him.

 

He sighed and shouldered his way into the cabin - it was dark, empty, and freezing cold, which didn’t exactly improve Will’s mood. He’d known that none of his siblings would be there - not even Lee - but it hadn’t really sunk in until that moment. He’d never stayed in the cabin by himself before... his dad wasn’t exactly a slacker in the baby-making department, and Apollo was the biggest cabin after Ares (Hermes did not count!).

 

So yep. _Weird._

 

Will tried not to dwell on his dad’s camp visit as he swept up and tried to inject some life back into the dusty cabin, but it was hard. He wasn’t the only one of his siblings to have never met his father - in fact, only four of them had as far as he knew. Apollo wasn’t exactly a bad father as the Olympians went - he had sent help for two of his children when they’d been in trouble last year, and every now and then things like new instruments and medical textbooks would just appear in the cabin for them all to share, which was more contact than a lot of the cabins got. Still, it was difficult not to feel bitter that Apollo had personally escorted two random demigods to the camp in his chariot, but had never even appeared to Will to say hi.

 

He shook his head, and told himself to snap out of it. He wasn’t going to start holding a grudge against his dad after all this time, and it certainly wasn’t the new kid’s fault. Will remembered how the new camper - Nico - had been sitting playing cards alone, and made up his mind to go and speak to him once he was done with cleaning the cabin.

 

After all, they were both all alone here. Maybe they could be friends.

  
  


XXX

  
  


"Hi!"

 

Nico looked up from his deck of cards to find a boy about his age approaching him across the dining pavilion. He was wearing a thick coat, scarf and gloves, his cheeks were pink, his sandy blond hair was windswept, and he was giving Nico a friendly smile.

 

Nico smiled back. "Hi."

 

"Can I sit down?" The boy asked when he reached him. He sat down without waiting for an answer and grinned. "You’re Nico, right? I’m Will - Will Solace."

 

"Nico di Angelo."

 

Will pulled his right glove off with his teeth and then held out his hand to Nico. "Welcome to camp," he said. Nico shook it - his hand was very warm from being in the glove, but he put it back on straight away. "How do you like it so far?"

 

Nico grinned as well. "It’s _so cool_ ," he said. "I mean, there’s a _centaur_ and wall with lava and the Greek gods are _real_ and I've actually met _two_ of them already and all the trees here have dryads and in the stables over there there's flying horses - though they don’t seem to like me very much..."

 

Nico trailed off, feeling himself starting to blush. Why couldn't he ever just shut up?

 

Will didn't seem to mind though - he just grinned wider and shrugged. "Try giving them sugar lumps," he said.

 

Nico grinned again. He studied Will for a moment, thinking that he seemed kind of familiar, but he was sure that he hadn't been at camp the last two weeks. "I haven’t seen you before," he said. "Have you just arrived?"

 

"Yeah - I’ve been at home since the summer, and my Mom and I came up to Boston for the holidays… and I got attacked by a empousa," Will said. "It wasn’t really after me, we just kind of bumped into it, and I only just got away. I thought I’d better come back to camp for a while so Mom could get home safely."

 

He looked down at the floor, his grin gone. Nico didn't know exactly what an empousa was since there wasn't a card for it, but it didn't sound fun. And he knew what it was like to be separated from your family.

 

"That’s… horrible." It didn't really cover it, but it was the best he could think of.

 

Will looked back at him, and gave him a sad half-smile. "That’s the life of a half-blood," he said. "Unfortunately you kind of have to get used to it."

 

Nico nodded - he'd figured as much. "How did you get away? Did you kill it?"

 

"No, I ran like hell," Will said, then grinned again at the surprised look Nico gave him. "Well I only had a dagger on me and I'm faster than I look, so running seemed the best option. If in doubt, _run_."

 

"My sister and I were attacked by a manticore," he told Will.

 

"Woah," said Will. He looked so impressed that Nico couldn't help but smile again.

 

"Yeah," he said modestly. "He’d been posing as our teacher. It was _crazy_."

 

"How did you get away?"

 

"Well there was a dance going on, and Dr Thorn - the manticore - he lured me and Bianca outside, away from everyone else, but Percy Jackson came running after us and he challenged it, all by himself."

 

Will's rosy cheeks went a little more pink. "Percy's really brave like that," he said.

 

Nico grinned. "I know, right?"

 

"Did he kill it?"

 

"Well, no - it was massive, and really dangerous. But he was fighting it, with Thalia and Grover and the other girl... Annabeth? And then Artemis and all her hunters showed up."

 

He could hear the bitterness creeping into his tone, but he didn't care. Those girls had shown up when no one had asked them to - Percy had had it handled, he would have saved them without their help. And then to make it worse they'd... _stolen_ Bianca from him.

 

Will didn't seem to have noticed. "Oh yeah, I heard the hunters were here," he said, looking over to Artemis' cabin, which was empty at the moment - Nico had watched all the hunters disappear into the woods a few hours before. "From the sounds of it I was lucky to miss capture the flag."

 

Nico nodded, wide-eyed as he remembered the game. "It was really violent," he said. "Three of the Ares kids are still the infirmary."

 

Will immediately looked worried. "Really? I'd better go and check on them in a bit," he said.

 

Nico frowned, a little confused. Will didn't look like a son of Ares, and from what he'd seen of those Ares kids they didn't seem like people anyone would want to visit just to visit with them. But then, Will was definitely the nicest kid he'd met at the camp so far - he was probably friends with everyone.

 

Will cleared his throat, sounding kind of nervous all of a sudden - the change made Nico feel nervous as well, and he braced himself for whatever Will was about to say. "So... I heard that you came to camp in Apollo’s chariot," he said.

 

Nico relaxed. That wasn't bad - everyone had wanted to know about that. "Yeah, talk about crazy, right? _Apollo_."

 

Will nodded, but when he smiled it didn't quite reach his eyes. His eyes were really blue, like the sky... and suddenly Nico realised he was an idiot.

 

"Wait… he’s your father, isn’t he?" He said. "You're a son of Apollo."

 

Will nodded sheepishly. "How did you know?"

 

"You look like him," said Nico, staring at Will's face and wondering how he had missed the similarities before. "A lot."

 

Will smiled again. "Really?"

 

Nico cocked his head to one side. "Haven’t you ever met him?"  

 

"No." Will scuffed his shoe on the pavilion floor and shrugged. "He claimed me right away - I’d only been at camp a few hours before he claimed me, but I’ve never actually met him."

 

Nico opened his mouth to say that he knew how he felt, but the truth was he didn't. He didn't know who his godly father was - and that was bad enough. He wondered if it was worse to know who your parent was, but never get to know them at all. He thought it was probably better to know, but it still couldn't be easy.

 

"Well at least he claimed you," he said after a moment. "I don’t know who my father is."

 

Nico winced, wondering if Will would think that he was dismissing his feelings, but he was nodding along.

 

"I know, I’m one of the lucky ones," he said.

 

At that exact moment, the sun broke through the clouds and shone down the dining pavilion. It was warmer and brighter than you'd expect a December sun to be, and Will turned to face it like he was a flower, closing his eyes and smiling contendedly.

 

He chuckled and looked back at Nico. "And dad does little things like that all the time," he said.

 

Nico grinned. He'd already thought Apollo was pretty awesome - right then, sitting in the warm sun in the middle of December, he thought it again. Not that the cold ever bothered him much, but _still_.

 

Will tugged off his gloves and started unwinding his scarf.

 

"What's the game you're playing?" He asked, nodding to the table top.

 

Nico felt himself blushing again. "Oh… it’s called Mythomagic… it seems a bit silly now, now that I know it’s all real..."

 

Will picked up a couple of the cards and read them, and his eyes lit up. "You're kidding - it's an RP about the gods?" He laughed, but it wasn't scornful - he sounded delighted. "Can we play? How do you play?"

 

Nico blinked at him, surprised at his enthusiasm. Connor and Travis had spent the last week making fun of him for playing it... which was kind of understandable, knowing what he knew now - but he still liked it.

 

"You want me to teach you?" He asked.

 

"Go on," wheedled Will. "You teach me this, I’ll teach you how to shoot a bow."

 

Nico grinned."Of course - Apollo is the god of archery!"  

 

Will grinned back. "Yep," he said. "Though... I’m not actually that great at it - not compared to my brothers and sisters anyway. But I can definitely teach you the basics."

 

"...And he's also the god of medicine... is that why you want to visit the Ares kids?"

 

Will snorted. "Wouldn't want to go near them otherwise," he said, though his eyes were sparkling. "Yeah, medicine's definitely more my thing than the archery or the music or the poetry... and I'm definitely not into fortune telling either."

 

"Fortune telling?"

 

"Yeah - free tip for you - if my sister Evie offers to read your palm, _run away_."

 

Nico laughed for the first time since Bianca left on her mission, and started gathering up his cards and figurines. "Okay, well if you want to play, the first thing you need to do is pick a character. I guess you want to be Apollo?"

 

XXX

 

It turns out Mythomagic takes a long time to learn, and Will wanted to check in on the infirmary before dinner, so they decided to continue the game the next day.

 

Except they'd barely started setting up their game the next day when they found out that Percy, Annabeth and Grover were back at camp and there was a consellors' meeting going on right then. The second he heard the news, Nico went tearing off to the Big House.

 

Will dithered, unsure if he should go to represent Apollo cabin in Lee's absence, and later his indecision would haunt him. Maybe if he'd been there he could have done something.

 

The way Percy told it, he'd been talking to Nico about what had happened to his sister when they'd been attacked by some skeletons that had been tracking him or something, and while Percy had been distracted fighting them off (and somehow making a big crack in the dining pavilion, even though none of them had felt an earthquake), Nico had run away, too upset by Bianca's death to stay at the camp. He didn't come back that night, and there was no sign of him anywhere.

 

In fact, the only sign he'd been at camp at all was the Mythomagic figurine of Apollo that Will had been holding when Nico had taken off.


End file.
